Friday, January 18, 2013

The standard ‘Send to’ menu in the right-click context menu for files and folders in Windows Explorer shows a number of popular locations where you can copy or send files to. This menu can be customized by editing the items located under the “send to” shell folder. There is another menu called the “extended send to” that shows, aside from the locations on the standard menu, all the folders located under the user profile directory.

The extended send to menu can be activated by pressing the Shift key and then by right-clicking.

The extended send to menu can be immensely helpful for those users who frequently use these folders to save files, although I have to admit I rarely use Microsoft supplied folders. Anything remotely important goes into another partition specifically for storing data. I use the Documents and Pictures folders sometimes for storing unimportant files.

Customize the ‘Send to’ and ‘Extended Send to’ menu

If the send to menu has items that you never use or is missing some locations that you frequently use, you can fix that easily. Open the Run dialog box by pressing Win+R, and then type shell:sendto. Press Enter and the Send to folder will open in Explorer. All you need to do now is create shortcuts of your preferred folders and then copy the shortcuts here. To remove an item from the send to menu, simply delete the shortcut.

Similarly, you can edit the extended send to menu by adding or removing folders from your user profile directory. The user profile directory is located at C:\Users\Username. The quickest way to open this folder is to open the Run dialog box and type . (dot) and press Enter.

Be careful of what you delete because unlike the ‘send to’ folder, the items under the user profile are not shortcuts but the real thing. The user profile contains important folders and many installed programs use these folders to save data and program settings. Deleting these folders may cause these programs to function incorrectly or you may lose all your program settings.